Delhi’s AI Enclave: Inside the India AI Impact Expo & Summit 2026 – and Why it Matters Far Beyond Technology

by Tejasvi Sharma, Editor-in-Chief, EPC World

New Delhi has always been a city of declarations. Empires announced their arrival here; nations articulated their ambitions here. In February 2026, the declaration was of a different kind. Across the glass-and-stone expanse of Bharat Mandapam, the capital briefly transformed into an AI enclave—a dense, time-bound concentration of policymakers, technologists, investors, startups, diplomats, and students, all orbiting one idea: that artificial intelligence has moved from promise to policy, from experiment to execution.

For five days, the India AI Impact Expo & Summit 2026 turned Delhi into a global nerve centre of conversations on how intelligence—now increasingly machine-mediated—will shape cities, public services, industry, labour, and geopolitics. It was part exhibition, part policy conclave, part cultural moment. But more than that, it was a mirror held up to India’s own aspirations: bold in vision, complex in execution, and consequential in what it sets in motion next.

The inaugural moment: spectacle, symbolism, and the first stress test

The opening evening at Bharat Mandapam carried the theatre of national moments. With the Prime Minister inaugurating the Expo, the messaging was unmistakable: AI is no longer a peripheral technology story; it is now a strategic instrument of the Indian state. The words spoke of inclusion, public good, and the responsibility to shape technology for human progress. The symbolism mattered. When leadership frames AI in the language of public value, it signals to ministries, states, and municipal bodies that procurement priorities, funding pipelines, and project mandates will follow.

Yet, the first day also delivered a quieter, unintended lesson. Thousands of delegates queued for access; security and digital passes struggled to absorb the surge; traffic in parts of central Delhi tightened. The friction did not derail the event, but it reminded everyone present that the future of intelligence still depends on the fundamentals of physical infrastructure and operations engineering—crowd flow, transit integration, venue throughput, and last-mile logistics. In a way, the inaugural hiccups became a metaphor: AI’s grand narratives will be tested in the real world, by the mundane but decisive mechanics of how cities function.

The Expo floor: a gallery of applied intelligence

Inside the exhibition halls, the AI Impact Expo felt less like a trade fair and more like a curated gallery of possibilities. The organisers structured the experience around thematic “chakras” that moved the conversation beyond product demos toward purpose-driven deployment. One corridor showcased AI in healthcare—diagnostics that assist overworked clinicians, triage systems designed for rural outreach, and data platforms that promise to stitch fragmented health records into coherent care pathways. Another highlighted education and skilling, with adaptive learning platforms and AI tutors designed to personalise instruction in classrooms that have long struggled with scale and diversity.

Urban technology had its own gravitational pull. City dashboards, traffic analytics, predictive maintenance tools for utilities, and command-and-control centre simulations drew municipal delegations into animated conversations. For urban administrators, these were not abstract demos; they were previews of procurement decisions they will face soon—systems that promise to reduce non-revenue water, improve response times to grievances, and make infrastructure maintenance less reactive and more predictive.

Equally significant were the pavilions devoted to safe and trusted AI. In an era of algorithmic anxiety, explainability tools, audit frameworks, and data governance models attracted as much attention as the flashier generative applications. The subtext was clear: scale without trust will fail, and public-sector AI will be judged as much by its fairness as by its efficiency.

What distinguished the Expo was not the novelty of individual technologies—many have existed for years—but the sense that deployment at scale is now imminent. Cities were no longer asking whether AI works; they were asking how to integrate it into legacy systems, how to budget for it, and how to govern it without losing public confidence.

The Summit: where policy catches up with possibility

Running parallel to the Expo, the AI Impact Summit brought the weight of geopolitics into the conversation. Plenary sessions and closed-door roundtables assembled heads of state, ministers, global CEOs, researchers, and civil society leaders. The tone was pragmatic. There was less utopian rhetoric and more focus on governance frameworks, cross-border standards, and the ethics of deploying AI in public services.

One recurring theme was equity. Delegates from the Global South spoke candidly about the risk of technological dependency—how nations without access to affordable compute, sovereign data infrastructure, and talent pipelines could find themselves perpetually consuming AI rather than shaping it. India’s positioning of the Summit as a platform for Global South voices was not accidental; it reflected a strategic ambition to influence how AI norms are written, not merely how they are adopted.

Another throughline was institutional readiness. Policy leaders acknowledged that AI will not succeed in government environments without parallel investments in data quality, interoperability, cybersecurity, and procurement reform. In effect, the Summit reframed AI as a governance project as much as a technological one. The conversations suggested a future where tenders will increasingly ask not only for software, but for audit trails, model governance plans, and long-term operational accountability.

Youth, challenges, and the human face of innovation

Beyond the corridors of power, the Summit week carried a strong undercurrent of youth engagement and social innovation. Global impact challenges focused on women-led AI solutions, grassroots problem-solving, and applications designed for inclusion. These were not peripheral side events; they were narrative anchors. In a room full of policymakers and CEOs, the presence of students and early-stage founders served as a reminder that innovation ecosystems are sustained by aspiration as much as by capital.

The cultural evenings and informal networking spaces added texture to the week. Over dinners and receptions, conversations moved from regulation to collaboration, from competition to co-creation. These moments, often invisible in official communiqués, are where partnerships germinate—where a city official meets a startup founder, where a utility head discovers a pilot that could become tomorrow’s standard operating system.

The infrastructure beneath the intelligence

Perhaps the most important lesson of Delhi’s AI enclave was an implicit one: AI runs on infrastructure. Behind every dashboard lies a data centre. Behind every real-time analytics platform lies a fibre corridor. Behind every “smart” utility application lies a grid that must deliver uninterrupted power. The Expo’s emphasis on AI for public services inevitably pointed toward a coming surge in demand for digital infrastructure—compute clusters, resilient power systems, advanced cooling, and secure networks.

For the infrastructure sector, this is not an abstract opportunity. Data centres are energy-intensive assets that reshape power demand curves and force upgrades in transmission and distribution. Command-and-control centres require not only software but hardened facilities, redundant connectivity, and skilled operators. Citywide sensor networks create new layers of civil and electrical works. In short, the AI narrative is quietly rewriting the infrastructure playbook—blurring the line between “digital” and “physical” projects.

The inaugural day’s logistical strains also underscored this reality. Managing tens of thousands of delegates through a single venue is, at its core, an infrastructure challenge—of access design, crowd engineering, transport coordination, and emergency preparedness. If Delhi is to host more global tech congregations, the city will need to think of event districts as a distinct planning category, integrating transit, parking, security, and pedestrian flow into a cohesive operational system.

From demos to decisions: what follows the Expo

As the final sessions concluded and the exhibition halls began to empty, the enduring question was not what had been showcased, but what would be executed next. The true impact of the AI Impact Expo & Summit will be measured not in footfall numbers or social media impressions, but in the procurement files that open in ministries, the pilot projects sanctioned by municipalities, and the infrastructure tenders that quietly embed AI into the machinery of governance.

Three shifts seem inevitable. First, public-sector AI adoption will accelerate, driven by citizen service platforms, urban management systems, and health and education applications showcased at the Expo. Second, digital infrastructure will move closer to core infrastructure in policy thinking—power, fibre, data centres, and cybersecurity becoming as central to city planning as roads and water networks. Third, governance frameworks will harden: tenders will demand transparency, auditability, and compliance, forcing technology providers and EPC players alike to upgrade their capabilities.

A city of declarations, again

Delhi’s AI enclave was not flawless. It was crowded, occasionally chaotic, and at times overwhelming. But it was also authentic. It revealed an India willing to convene the world around a complex technology, willing to expose its ambitions to scrutiny, and willing to grapple with the operational realities that accompany scale.

For infrastructure professionals, the message is clear. The next wave of projects will not look like the last. They will be hybrid builds—part civil, part digital; part concrete, part code. The winners will be those who understand that AI is not a layer to be added at the end of a project, but a design parameter to be integrated from the start.

In the end, what unfolded at Bharat Mandapam was less a celebration of machines and more a statement about systems—how nations organise intelligence, how cities absorb technology, and how infrastructure quietly underwrites the futures we imagine. Delhi has made its declaration. The construction, in every sense of the word, now begins.